Wow!! That’s all your Eyewitness could exclaim when he heard that in the latest NGSA results, TWENTY kids received EQUAL SCORES!! That’s unique in the annals of our country’s history – going back over 80 years when “country scholarships” earned kids a place in Queen’s or Bishops!! Apart from feeling sorry for the kid that got just a few questions wrong and is now being rated 21 in the country – he could only marvel at the phenomenon of educational whizzes at the CSEC and CAPE levels trickling down to the primary level of 11-year-olds!! After all, it wasn’t just these high fliers that did so well, but the entire cohort, across the board.
The percentages of passes – getting more than 50 per cent correct in the tests – rose overall into the 60s!! We still got a way to go… but your Eyewitness gotta acknowledge that the Ministry’s efforts that have been put into raising performances appear to be paying off!! We now gotta keep preaching “Onwards, upward may we ever go!!” in the classrooms!!
But your Eyewitness sobered up when he read the Education Minister’s caveat that – “as usual” – the test scores were not raw scores but had been “standardised”. Uh…uh!! A standardised mark takes into account how difficult the paper was and how other students performed. So if we take the mathematics exams for the last two years and last year’s paper was relatively easy to this year’s, a raw score of 70 per cent may place a student only around the middle of the class last year but among the top performers this year!! Standardisation asks: “How well did this student perform compared with everyone else who wrote this examination?” Rather than “How many questions did the student answer correctly?”
Now standardisation doesn’t mean that marks are assigned arbitrarily or according to some quota. No, siree, Bob!! If the entire cohort – this year, 157,056 kids – performs exceptionally well, many students can still receive very high standardised scores. Likewise, if performance is generally weak, standardisation cannot turn poor performance into excellent performance!! So let’s consider the scores to be the fairest – as far as placing kids in the secondary schools that have different minimum marks for entry. But one sticking point is the Ministry of Education has never fully published the exact mathematical formula used to convert raw scores into standardised scores…leading to some head-scratching in some quarters!
And that – of course – brings up your Eyewitness pet gripe over the years!! Our Ministers have consistently promised raising the performance of ALL secondary schools up to the level of Queens and Bishops. But while there’s been some progress, we still got a far way to go!!
Hence the excitement over the toppers!!

…for values
Most folks today wouldn’t remember, but there was a time when all Guyanese “recycled”: not just their soda (“sweet drinks”?) bottles but also rum bottles – which at that time outnumbered the former! The recycling drive didn’t come from any Government pushing “environmentalism”, but from the mundane fact it was cheaper for the “beverage industry” to pay folks to return the glass bottles than to buy new ones!
With the advent of plastic bottles, these cost so little it ain’t worth the while for manufacturers to purchase empties. And this practice resulted in the non-biodegradable plastic bottles polluting the environment as it presently does – including clogging canals!. But in the US, they’ve solved the problem by mandating a five-cent consumer deposit on beverage bottles – redeemable when the bottle is returned!
With the slogan “Don’t trash ‘em – cash ‘em!”, their environmental problems were solved. There the purchasers have to place the plastic bottles in “recycle bags”!! And those dumped in garbage bins in the streets are collected by scavengers – for the return of five cents!!!!

…road smarts?
Last night your Eyewitness encountered a Policeman directing traffic at a roundabout!! Doesn’t this destroy the whole point? Your Eyewitness believes ALL drivers ought to have a one-week refresher course on roundabout protocols!!

The post Going…higher with NGSA appeared first on Guyana Times.